This past week, Julie, Keiko, and I stood out on the sidewalk and gave popsicles to the kids and their families leaving school on their second day of school. There was so much joy when the kids learned that we just wanted to celebrate the start of the school year with them. It was a great way to get to know our neighbors just a little bit more! And, it completely made up for the time I spent staring at the popsicles in the freezer section of the grocery store, as I was trying to find the most economical way to buy hundreds of popsicles when the boxes seem to have gotten smaller and the prices have continued to go up.
It is days like today where it really feels like the Scripture readings were written for our times too. Reading the Amos reading, it bore a strong resemblance to the news articles I just saw about inflation and how it is affecting our lives, especially in the grocery store. “We will sell our wheat charging higher prices for smaller portions…” (Amos 8:5b). It’s hard to tell if that is our time or Amos’. Yet, the Gospel also really seems to speak to situations of the world today, including the disparity in wealth, peoples’ fear over how they will survive if they lose their jobs, others who are being held down by debt, and ultimately trying to figure out who is trustworthy and who is not.
We had a long conversation about trust at my Foss Village Bible Study this week when I asked the residents “how do you know someone is trustworthy?” They boiled their answers down to it being a gut feeling. But, we also talked about how that gut feeling has to be backed up by experience, the patterns of words and actions that people show us. “If you can trust others in little things, you can also trust them in greater, and anyone unjust in a slight matter will also be unjust in a greater” (Luke 16: 10). While I had a lot of questions about other parts of the Gospel, this verse from Luke made a lot of sense to me based on my life experience. If people show their trustworthiness in the little things in our lives, and they show their trustworthiness repeatedly, then we trust them with even greater things, whether that be opening up to them more or trusting them to care for our beloved pets or possessions, etc. But, the opposite is also true, when we cannot trust people with the little things or when we have had our trust broken repeatedly, we don’t trust them with those greater things for fear of being let down again. Because it really hurts when we have our trust broken.
Sometimes, trust is broken on accident, and work can be done to repair the relationship. We are all human after all! But, I think this Gospel serves as a good reminder that we can draw boundaries where we need to, even if it is difficult to do, when people repeatedly break our trust. The Gospel doesn’t tell us that we have to keep putting trust in people who break our trust. And, I know for myself, the more my trust is broken, the more hesitant I am to trust others in the future. Because trust is not something that always develops instantly. Even if we have a “gut feeling” that we can trust someone, it still takes intentional work and time to develop trust between people.
Personally, this is one of the greatest gifts of my call to ministry to me, that I get to build trust with all of you and walk alongside you all through all parts of life. I do not take this part of my role lightly. It is so important that trustworthiness is a part of one of the charges we receive at our ordinations, when we are read Scripture that relate to our call to ministry. The verse comes from 1 Corinthians 4: 1-2: “Think of us in this way: as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.” In addition to having this read as a charge at my ordination, I also had to dwell in this text at the start of one of my Seminary classes every week for a whole semester. Each week something different stuck out to us, but the centering on trustworthiness always remained.
One of the questions I had this week about trustworthiness in this Gospel reading was why, when the manager was being fired for mismanaging the wealthy man’s property, is the wealthy man proud of the enterprising nature of the man who mismanaged even more of his property by forgiving part of the debt of those who owed the wealthy man. Every time I read it, I expect the people whose debts are being reduced to be the ones who are grateful for what this man has done, especially because their debts would have been worth a lot. Yet, we do not even hear how the people respond, just the wealthy man. Perhaps it is because he sees traits of himself in this devious manager, or perhaps he just has to shake his head about how this came to be, but it seems clear that this manager has a sense of how to do business with people. Like those who determine the deals at the grocery store now, he seems to know that sometimes you’ve got to make the prices a little lower to keep people interested in working with you.
There are so many ways that this week’s Scripture seems to fit with our world today. But one of the constant reminders for me throughout life is also one of the most quoted verses of this Scripture passage: ‘Subordinates can’t have two superiors. Either they’ll hate the one and love the other, or be attentive to the one and despise the other. You can’t worship both God and Money” (Luke 16: 13). The fact that you are listening to this sermon today might say a lot about which of the two you find more trustworthy, but I think we can never hear this reminder enough. While money is needed to live in this world, money changes the way we interact with the world around us and who we are able to trust. I think about celebrities who have often said in interviews that it is so difficult to tell who is interested in them as a person and who is interested in just their power and money. Same with the reason why so many states allow lottery winners to remain anonymous. Money changes our relationship with ourselves, with those around us, and with God.
Ultimately, though, it is up to you to determine who and what is deemed trustworthy in your life. But, Jesus reminds in today’s parable that we will tire of the ways of the world and will then be welcomed into the eternal home; “So I tell you: make friends for yourselves through your use of this world’s goods, so that when they fail you, you’ll be welcomed into an eternal home” (Luke 16: 9). Jesus reminds us that the trust we place in earthly objects to give us meaning will ultimately fail us, yet God continually remains faithful and trustworthy.
So, as we are a community of stewards together, stewards of God’s creation and Christ’s church, may we continue to find ways to be faithfully trustworthy with one another. Because there is so much beauty and joy to behold in this little community of ours, including the joy of eating a simple popsicle, even when the sky is gray and cloudy, to make just one day better. And, together we get to explore what it truly means to live into the reality of God’s trustworthiness because that is a beautiful promise that we are given too.